The foot note poets; What is the purpose of a poem?

Joseph Campbell is on his way, but take a step back.

What is the purpose of a poem?

The best answer, I think, and the simple answer, is the one given by A.C. Bradley in his first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry back in 1901: to provide the pleasure that reading poetry provides. This is a unique pleasure. It may have similarities with other arts or other forms of reading, but it is unique and specific to poetry.

Eliot said much the same thing in ‘The Social Function of Poetry’  before wandering off into the usual self-inflating modernist waffle.

A more recent restatement of Bradley’s point claims that the poem creates a space where a reader is able to think through and in language: ‘through’ meaning both ’ ‘by means of’ and literally ‘moving through’. In a democratic country, adults are able to encounter the poem in the private space of their reading, without being told what to think or how to react or have their hands held in case the poem contains invidious ideological content someone else has decided is bad for them.

It is a private, unique encounter with language. Many people may never have experienced this pleasure but it exists.  Some people appear to enjoy fishing and others enjoy riding jet skis or watching football.  A shrinking group of people enjoys reading poetry.

Reading the critical discourse about poetry, especially a lot of modern discussions, one could be forgiven for thinking that the people who do the most writing and talking about poetry have never enjoyed reading poems. Or if they have, they have been watching over their shoulder in case someone tells them they shouldn’t be enjoying that poet or those poems. 

However, we still talk about Poetry as though all poems and poets were the same. But we don’t read Poetry: we read poems.  Poems can be spread on a continuum. At one end are those that seem to approach the character of a postcard chopped into short lines. You might smile or laugh or wince, but you don’t remember them the next day.

And at the other end of the continuum there is the deliberately, if not aggressively, rebarbative poem. Reading these is reminiscent of standing on the wrong side of a door overhearing snatches of the incoherent mumblings of a troubled sleeper.

It’s not an objective scale that can be calibrated. Each reader has the privilege of deciding where he or she would place each poem, and which type of poem he or she enjoys.  And that can change even on a daily basis.  There are times when reciting Robert Service gets me home, and others when only Geoffrey Hill will do.  What is incomprehensible for one reader is beautiful to another: what is too banal for one reader, can be cherished by another. In an ideal world people would accept this the way they do with music.

You can use poems for all kinds of things, from teaching grammar to protesting about inequality, but these uses are secondary and can be done better with other things. There is pleasure in talking about poetry, and arguing about it, and nagging at questions of quality and value, but these are secondary. There is a pleasure in reading about poets, their biographies, letters and statements, but these too are secondary. Unfortunately the secondary has become much louder and much more visible than that private pleasure of reading a poem.

So if you want a reaction, or an audience, don’t write a poem. Write an article about how poetry is dead, or no longer matters, or why you hate it. Write an article denigrating the kind of poetry you don’t like, or the poets you envy.  Write about how Poetry is this that or the other and can be used to cure cancer, social inequality and shine submarines. Guaranteed responses and no poems need be involved in the discussion.

One of the oddities of our present time is that despite the enthusiasm people have for opinionating about Poetry (guilty as charged yer honor), despite the conferences and workshops and the courses on offer at university and at writers groups, despite the interviews and opinion pieces, despite the fact more poetry books are being published than at any other time in history, none of this seems to be improving the quality of the poems that are being written. In fact it is possible to argue the opposite is happening.

We’re fast approaching the centennial of 1922.  But I’m not sure we’ve come a long way since then and rereading Pound’s assaults on the contemporary poetry scene in pre-First World War London, it all sounds horribly familiar.

One might argue that if poets spent less time writing articles or giving papers, and more time working on their own poems, paying more attention to the quality of their own poems and less to ‘issues in contemporary poetry’, readers like me would have better poems in return for the money we spend on poetry books. If all you're interested in is Poetry, than the quality of the individual poem is almost irrelevant. 

W.H.Auden, The Poet and the City. Attitudes towards poetry......

Today's set questions explore the way the strange beliefs about poetry and poets, which you have studied dating back to Sidney, underwrite various statements.

Read the following quote taken from W.H.Auden's "The Poet and the City" then write your essay on one of the following questions: 

"If a poet meets an illiterate peasant, they may not be able to say much to each other ..."

A) Discuss the underlying arrogance in this statement. What does it reveal about Auden's conception of the poet and his attitude towards  the 'Illiterate peasant'. You may use the word stupid in your essay. 

B) Why cannot an illiterate peasant be a poet? Consider your answer carefully before you start writing.  

C) As a cultural critic, consider the broader implications of the fact that someone could write this and be considered intelligent,  perceptive and worthy of attention.

T.S.Eliot, cultural, social criticism and why poets should stick to poetry

The history of poetry is littered with defences which make wild claims for the power of an abstraction called Poetry. I’ve traced this though numerous previous posts.  One of the great Ironies is that the epitome of the modern public poet, T.S.Eliot, is a perfect example of why the idea that writing poetry gives the writer some kind of privileged status, is, to put it politely, nonsense.

T.S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development (1972) by  James Margolis is a study of an intelligent, articulate man, with a refined skill in the arrangement of words, wanting to do more than just arrange words.  Eliot’s career highlights the dilemma; intelligent and articulate he may have been, deeply committed, after 1928 to the issue of Christian Witness, he most certainly way: but Eliot, by his own admission, was not an expert in Theology, or Economics, or Education. And the fact he wrote some of the most memorable poetry of the twentieth century could not underwrite his opinions on anything other than poetry. 

In his preface Margolis points out:

Though he had many penetrating observations on these topics [education, politics, religion, literature], he was not a systematic thinker with comprehensive theories. His remarks –and especially those on literature –are often more valuable for the light they cast on Eliot’s own thinking as the time then for the contribution they make to the fields they concern. (pxv)

Margolis quotes a letter from June 1934 from Eliot to Paul Elmer More: ”I am not a systematic thinker, if indeed I am a thinker at all. I depend upon intuitions and perceptions: an although I may have some skill in the barren game of controversy: [I] have little capacity for sustained, exact and closely knit argument and reasoning.” (qtd Margolis, 1976, p.xv)

In 1934 Eliot wrote: “At the present time, I am not very much interested in the only subject which I am supposed to be qualified to write about: that is, one kind of literary criticism. I am not very much interested in literature, except dramatic literature: and I am largely interested in subjects which I do not yet know very much about: theology, politics, economics and education.” (qtd Margolis, 19176, p177)

If Eliot has lost interest in literature, part of the reason had to be that for someone like himself, who didn’t just want to reinterpret society, but to change it, it was obvious that poetry was the wrong vehicle.

“Of what use is this experimenting with rhythms and words, this effort to find the precise metric and the exact image to set down feelings which, if communicable at all, can be communicated to so few that the result seems insignificant compared to the labour.” (Eliot, ‘Christianity and communism’ Listener, 16 March 932, p.382 qtd Margolis 184)

I think this question should be answered by anyone who wants to pretend poetry is a vehicle for changing the world in the 21st century.

The essential dilemma that Eliot faced is that of an articulate, intelligent individual, who cares passionately and wants to change the world, but whose distinction is the ability to arrange words in patterns on the page. To misquote Bunting’s phrase, in a democracy, poets have no more power than anyone else with the vote, and Eliot as social critic was nothing more (or less) than an intelligent eloquent man with opinions. Those opinions had no more or less value than any other intelligent and eloquent individual’s. When not directly about poetry, those opinions could not be underwritten by his poetry, and his amateur status in the fields of theology, economics and education, would be easily exposed. 

The Defences of Poetry; Part Eight Eliot and the End

In The Social Function of Poetry Eliot tried to negotiate the contradictions. There is an obvious tension in the essay between what he tries to claim for poetry and what his intelligence tells him is the way the world works. Part of this tension may be created by the context of this talk.

He began with a note of caution that could easily have  served as an epitaph for every attempt to discuss either “the function of poetry” or “the role of the poet”:

When we speak of the ‘function’ of anything we are likely to be thinking of what that thing ought to do rather than what it does do or has done. That is an important distinction because I do not intend to talk about what I think poetry ought to do. People who tell us what poetry ought to do, especially if they are poets themselves,  usually have in mind  the particular kind of poetry they would like to write. (SFP p3)

But his history is no better than Pound’s or Shelley’s (this surprised me):

A superior language can seldom be exterminated except by the extermination of the people who speak it. When one language supersedes another it is usually because that language has advantages that commend it, and which offer not merely a difference but a wider and more refined range, not only for thinking and feeling, than the more primitive language”(SFP, 8)

Linguistically, Eliot’s statement date him as badly as Shelley’s do.  “There are, however, several widely held misconceptions about Language…The most important of these is the idea that there are such things as primitive languages-languages with a  simple grammar, a few sounds, and a vocabulary of only a few hundred words, whose speakers have to compensate for their language’s deficiencies through gestures”  (Crystal 2006).

Eliot ironically echoes those scholars who once dismissed English as a language incapable of precision.

He also seems to be willfully ignoring the historical fact that “advantages’ were often political rather than linguistic. Old English did not disappear because Anglo-Norman had a wider and more refined range, but because the English Aristocracy was all but eradicated in three battles in 1066 and from the end of the 11^th Century to the middle of the 14^th Century French was the privileged language,  the kings of England did not speak English, and anyone who wanted to deal with either the law or the administration had to learn French or Latin. Irish and Welsh almost disappeared as native languages not because they were inadequate but because the people in  power banned them and refused to communicate in those languages.

Eliot does try to address the obvious contraction: how does original poetry, making demands on its small but elite readership, affect the health of the culture? His answer is confused ( I find it very difficult to write that about T.S.Eliot). It could only work in a “homogenous culture” where the elite readership of the best modern poetry are in fact the cultural elite, the people who matter. Others will want to follow their example, so  there will be an inevitable trickle down effect which will eventually spread the influence of poetry throughout society. Gioia states the same argument.  Both writers ignore the fact that modern culture is not homogenous (even the England of Eliot in the 1940s wasn’t).  Neither reading nor writing poetry in English has guaranteed  membership of a cultural elite, apart from the self appointed ones we’ve been studying. Sidney belonged to a cultural elite who others copied because he was born into the aristocracy and connected to some of the wealthiest families in the country.  His birth guaranteed his social status: his status validated his poems. Not the other way round. Sir Ernest Gower’s 'Plain words"  and I A Richard’s “Practical Criticism” in their own ways underline the limitations  of the linguistic skills of the “cultural elite”.

Eliot, like Pound, and Shelley, and Gioia and other s after him, confused cause and symptom and fell victim to his own muddled metaphor. (I find that really hard to write about the first two as well) Language is not an organic plant that flowers if fertilised with great poetry and withers if forced to survive on a diet of ..whichever poet you think is not great.  Even if it were possible to define what is good and bad poetry against an objective standard, and avoid the inherent moralizing,  it is difficult to believe any culture died because of bad poetry or any language disappeared for Eliot’s reasons.  

A language disappears because the people who speak it die out, and according to modern linguists,  of the world’s 6,000 or so languages  perhaps half will die out in the present century (Crystal 2008 p 336). The disappearance of cultured literary productions may be one symptom of a society more concerned with survival. As Stead also observed, it is impossible to imagine how poetry improves the health of a nation.   If Eliot and Pound were right, then given their strictures about the state of English poetry,  England should have lost the First world war.

Anyone trying to make this argument is guilty of confusing symptoms with causes and in Rosemary Waldrop’s words acting “ as if there existed nothing but society on the one hand and  writing on the other” (Bernstein 1990). Eliot acknowledges this and then ignores the implications, presumably because they would invalidate the claims he is making.   Waldrop succinctly points out the obvious objection: The two decades before Hitler came to power were a period of incredible literary flowering, upheaval, exploration in Germany. All the dadaists and expressionists had been questioning, challenging, exploring changing the language, limbering up its joints. So the German language should have been in very good condition, yet the Nazis had no trouble putting it to work for their purposes, perverting it to where what was said was light years from what was meant. So while language thinks for us, there is no guarantee that it will be in a direction we like. (In Bertstein p47)

This destructive wander through the Defences was one way of stripping away the accumulated waffle to see what, if anything is left. I think there’s a great deal, but it doesn’t rely on silly claims for what an abstraction called ‘Poetry’ obviously doesn’t or can’t do now, and never has done in the past. 

The Defences of Poetry part six: consequences B, some modern examples

Does any of this really matter? Who cares what some disappointed aristocrat wrote to soothe his sense of career failure or some towering egotist wrote to massage his own enormous sense of self-importance while living the high life in Italy?

Yes it does matter. We should care. To quote Pierre Bourdieu:

In an artistic field which has reached an advanced stage of its history, there is no place for naïf’s: more precisely, the history is immanent in the functioning of the field, and to meet the object demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to possess the whole history of the field.

There is far too much historical amnesia in the current discourse about poetry

Or to put it another way, the whole house of cards that constitutes the field of modern poetry: the way we talk about poetry, its obligatory use in schools when the majority of any population, including the people teaching it, don’t read it for pleasure, the way it is treated in University writing programs, the claims made by governing bodies, the fact we have governing bodies,  attitudes towards publication and reception,  rests on these works, and the way they have been recirculated in a sealed acoustic where the phrase “where is your evidence?” has been treated as a sign of unbearable naivety by those guilty of a much more fundamental naivety.

So before going on to Pound and Eliot 

1) The modern world; some scattered observations

In what follows I want to briefly look at some contemporary examples.  This is not meant to be exhaustive, just an illustration,  and space does not allow a detailed analysis of each example.  I’ve already mentioned a couple of posts back about the 2013 “A Poet, Cheating for money?” scandal, the bizarre things  and in previous posts about the way we talk about Poetry in the way we talk about no other art.

Examples can be easily found in any contemporary discussion or use of poetry but Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities(2005),  and Terry Eagelton’s How to Read a Poem (2007)  will serve as one example.   Both take for granted Sidney’s argument about the power of Poetry. 

According to Dawson the purpose of modern creative writing courses should be to turn out “literary Intellectuals” who will be “oppositional critics”. Oppositional criticism being:  textual or cultural critique of received opinions, with the ultimate aim of affecting social change , or at least an alteration of public opinion , beyond the refinements of disciplinary knowledge (p.201).  This is an extension and variation  on the romantic ideal of the outsider artist, given its most famous poetic expression in Shelley’s Defence. The claims for Poetry as an active participant in contemporary political processes, able to affect the community at large, flounder when one tries to see how this could operate outside the seminar room or find an example.

Analysing the ideology of poems written in the past, Terry Eagleton’s preferred method (Eagleton 2007), or discussing the ideology of poems written in the work shop (Dawson)  assumes poetry has inherent power over the reader which apprentice poets need to learn to use in appropriate ways (for which read, ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Dawson) and readers need to learn how to resist (but only what and in ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Eagleton).

This is based on the equally traditional belief that poetry “delights and instructs”, an idea that goes back in English to Sidney but beyond him to Horace. Such an approach reduces poetry to a carrier of ideological viruses  and poems to content,  just as the reviewers of the late nineteenth century judged a poet for “what he [sic] said”.  

However, at no stage can either Dawson or Eagleton, or anyone else, show how studying poetry this way prepares the student to do anything other than study poetry in this way. When put blandly: Poetry is the art of using words charged to their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders  lose the skill to shape, appreciate and understand the power of language will become slaves to those who retain it-be they politicians, preachers, copywriters or news casters  (Gioia 1992) can seem  baffling in its casual arrogance.  

Who are these self-appointed “intellectual leaders”. Gioia’s title Can Poetry Matter  is a Koan like encapsulation of the problem. It assumes “Poetry” means the same thing to everyone, and that it can and should “matter” to everyone, in the same way for the same reasons.

Even when the writer seems to be distancing herself from previous claims, she can be  trapped into recycling them. In an article published in the English Guardian in 2006 Adrienne Rich began by quoting Shelley’s famous statement and then qualified what she was discussing.

I hope never to idealise poetry - it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.

But by the end of the article, which is only 995 words long,  she has forgotten this and is writing about “Poetry’ as if it were all the things she has just claimed it is not:

Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom - that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented (Rich 2006).

My final brief example is from outside academic discussions. In the 21st Century, despite its miniscule share of the book market, (last year Britons apparently spent more on Pringles Chips than poetry books) despite the invisibility of poets for the majority of the population, Poetry rather than poets or poems, still has a privileged cultural position. 

In 2009 the British based poetry publisher Salt was in financial difficulties. Faced with impending bankruptcy it launched an appeal called “Save Our Salt”. [1]   Salt claimed that unless X number of books were sold in a limited time, it would be finished.  Word spread around the blogosphere, news outlets picked up the story, Salt sold its required number of books and the crisis was temporarily averted. 

At the time it seemed like a small but interesting example of the strange position poetry occupies in modern culture. It was difficult to imagine General Motors Holden for example,  during one of its regular financial crisis, appealing to the American consumer in a similar manner.  “We are going broke because you don’t want our product. Please buy the product you don’t want so we can continue to make the make the product you don’t want.”

In 2010, faced inevitably with the same problem, Salt relaunched their campaign with the following statement from Griff Rhys-Jones on the website:

Support the good work here. Don’t let Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants. We can lose a few of them, but we do not have enough small independent and daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t? It’s a great list. And apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for studious folk like us. [2]

For many British communities the devastating social, economic and cultural effects of the closure of major industrial operations like ‘Motor Manufacturers’   are too familiar.  Why these might be lesser than the disappearance of  a small poetry publisher raises questions, not just about the values of “studious folks like us”,  but about their attitudes to poetry.  Referring to an idealised Poetry,  Jones cannot explain how poetry will help the economy in many subtle ways. Nor can he help but reveal the clubby sense that “bookish folk like us” feel they are rather superior to the masses who rely on motor manufacturers and fast food restaurants.

So this tracking of the defences is not “history” in the sense of something past and finished: whether or not Poets were prophets in the early stages of an unspecified culture is of academic interest in the derogatory sense of that term. Barbers were, until recently, surgeons,  but nobody goes to one today for open heart surgery.  This is a history, in Bourdieu’s terms which is immanent in the functioning of the field.  How individual writers or teachers situate themselves depends to a large extent on which versions of Poetry and Poet their craft is based on.  To use another Bourdieu quote;

This is why…it is so important if one is to have a bit of freedom from the constraints of the field, to attempt to explore the limits of the theoretical box in which one is imprisoned.

And so onwards to Pound and Eliot.

CE: As with all these posts, you are welcome to use them as long as you acknowledge your source. Referencing has been removed as a small anti-plagiarism device. If you contact me through the comments I'll happily supply them.

---

[1] See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/may/27/poetry-salt-publishing

http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com/2009/05/save-salt-publishing-one-book-at-time.html

 http://www.thebookseller.com/news/salt-just-one-book-campaign-staves-closure.html

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/salts-campaign-funds-eroded-bad-autumn-sales.html

[2] http://www.saltpublishing.com/justonebook/